Our digital lives need massive data centers. What goes on inside them?
We toured a facility in Northern Virginia to see how it works and to understand why water use and energy consumption are such a concern.
The concrete black-paneled building known as DC12 looks like a regular corporate office, its tinted lobby windows reflecting the surrounding suburban landscape in Northern Virginia.
But beyond a double-locked entry chamber are the computer servers, fiber-optic cables and other technology that make up the infrastructure of our digital lives.
This 114,300-square-foot facility, owned by a company called Equinix, is one of the world’s nearly 7,000 data centers, which serve society’s insatiable addiction to smart technology. Thousands of computer servers here process bank transactions, stream movies, execute retail purchases or run algorithms for artificial intelligence software.
Equinix, which owns 264 data centers in 33 countries, offered The Washington Post a tour of one of its facilities in Northern Virginia — home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world — for a rare glimpse inside how the tech industry’s backbone works.
The data center industry has grown exponentially during the past decade, particularly in Northern Virginia, where some of the massive buildings are a short walk from surrounding homes.
More than half a million people in Northern Virginia live in a neighborhood that’s less than a mile from a data center. That’s more than 1 in 5 residents.
In 2014, there were about 20 data centers near where the Equinix facility that The Post toured now exists.
Ten years later, the area is transformed, with more than 50 data centers shown in this satellite image.
Different types of data centers meet different demands. Many are connected to one another via a labyrinth of underground fiber-optic cables that make up the public internet network, or to private cables that are accessible only to specific customers. All are geared to minimize latency, or the time it takes for data to get from its source to you, the end user. There are four main types of data centers:
• An “enterprise” data center serves the needs of the company that owns it. Think of a corporation that stores in-house information on its own computers.
• Larger “hyperscale” data centers, owned by companies such as Amazon or Meta, have computer servers that cater solely to the company’s customers.
• “Edge” data centers are smaller buildings in or near major population centers, where digital connectivity becomes almost instantaneous for, say, a passing driverless car.
• Equinix is among the world’s largest owners of “colocation” data centers. Those facilities lease space to other businesses that hook up their servers to cables that belong to the data center company.
Inside DC12 and an adjoining DC15 building — both named after the D.C. region they cater to — are rows of server “cages” that cover almost the entire floor.
Each one houses the servers of individual companies, whose technicians sometimes visit to check on the equipment, many wearing backpacks stuffed with laptops and tools.
Netflix is a customer. So are Zoom, Hertz, Red Bull, Nasdaq and several banks and health care companies.
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Companies come to colocation data centers “because they’re trying to communicate with others,” said Chris Kimm, Equinix’s senior vice president of Global Customer Care and Experience.
For example, a company with a retail clothing website would want its servers to connect to those of a bank that offers financing for those purchases and to advertisers who want to use the company’s website to pitch customers on a different product.
The connections are made by fiber-optic cables that run above the cages, all of them tied to larger below-ground cables that connect to the internet or to other data centers on private lines. The links between companies can happen inside the same building, through underground cables that connect to different buildings on the same property, to buildings in other parts of the country or via undersea cables to buildings in a different country.
But all that computing power from the servers and routers inside a data center comes with a major drawback: massive amounts of heat.
Data center companies deal with that problem by using fans, water or both. Each has its own benefit and downside. Cooling systems that depend on air are more energy intensive. They release the building’s heat into the outside air and are a source of complaint from neighbors who can hear those fans.
Systems that use water are more efficient and less expensive. But they can become a problem in places where water is scarce by using too much of it.
Data center companies often factor in the surrounding climate when choosing a cooling system. Buildings in arid areas, such as Arizona, are likely to use air-based systems. In places such as Virginia, where droughts are not as common, a water-based cooling system might be more appealing.
Equinix typically uses a mixture of air and a closed-loop, non-evaporative water system for its cooling that, inside DC15, uses 85,000 gallons of water, with no refills. Here’s how that works:
To keep their expensive equipment from overheating, data center companies channel that hot air into a cooling system.
Closed-loop water system
Equinix uses a closed-loop, non-evaporative water system that does not require refilling. In that system, the rising hot air from the servers enters a heat exchanger near the building roof that merges the air with cool water. The water absorbs most of the heat and is cooled again by chillers.
The cool water is piped into computer room air handler, or CRAH, units on the floor, which blow cold air into the room that is sucked in by the servers to keep the chips inside them cool.
The process begins again with the servers expelling hot air into an isolated “hot aisle,” where it again rises toward the roof and into the heat exchanger.
Evaporating water cooling system
Some data centers use an evaporating water cooling system that allows steam from the water that is warmed by the servers’ hot air to leave the building through vents into the outside air. Those less-expensive systems require regular refills of water.
All that activity — the servers processing data and the elaborate systems built to keep them cool — requires massive amounts of energy that has prompted concerns about the industry’s growing effect on the nation’s already struggling electric grid.
DC12 alone is equipped to ramp up to 18 megawatts of energy usage, enough to power 14,400 homes, with most of that energy used by the servers. DC15 has a capacity of 28.8 megawatts. Data centers owned by other companies use as much as 100 megawatts, while data center campuses use as much as 1 gigawatt, enough to power most of San Francisco.
The industry has been working to offset the environmental effects of that usage by investing in renewable energy projects.
Some companies also use the released heat for other purposes, such as rooftop greenhouses or to warm surrounding homes.
As part of a program Equinix operates in several European countries and Canada, the expelled heat from a data center in Paris was used to keep the pool water warm at the Olympic Aquatic Centre during the summer games.
About this story
Data reporting by Andrew Ba Tran. Videos by Hadley Green and Daron Taylor. Graphics animation by Leslie Shapiro. Maps by Laris Karklis. Design and development by Allison Mann. Video editing by Whitney Leaming, Jessica Koscielniak and Tom LeGro. Graphics editing by Manuel Canales. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Editing by Jennifer Barrios and Tara McCarty. Data editing by Meghan Hoyer. Project editing by KC Schaper. Copy editing by Jeremy Lang. Additional support from Jordan Melendrez, Kathleen Floyd and Victoria Rossi.
About the Power Grab series
The artificial intelligence industry is driving a nationwide data center building boom. These sprawling warehouses of computing infrastructure are creating explosive demand for power, water and other resources. Power Grab investigates the effects on America and the risks AI infrastructure creates for the environment and the energy transition.